Turtle Rock announces “vigorous overhaul” for Evolve as it goes free-to-play on PC

Even though it sold several million copies, Evolve more or less disappeared from the public eye after its release in early 2015. A confusing (and pricey) DLC structure seems to have pushed away almost everyone that was enamored by the game after its 2014 debut at PAX East, or its subsequent pre-release showings at E3 or Gamescom.

But Turtle Rock wants to revitalize their 4v1 shooter, and they’re going to start by making Evolve a free-to-play game on the PC beginning tomorrow, July 7. In addition to rebalancing the Hunter classes and making improvements to the maps, Turtle Rock wrote on their Community Forum that they plan to use this “Beta” relaunch as a testing ground for weekly updates to Evolve:

Here’s how it’s going to work: We’re going to make Evolve free on PC as a Beta starting on July 7. This is going to allow us to hit our new server infrastructure really hard and we need your help testing. Stuff could break, and that’s our hope, because that will give us time to improve things as we go. We’ll parse out major Beta revisions, updates and features over a period of weeks and months — a plan we’re going to continually communicate here. This allows us to test new features and major changes to make our game more accessible and ever closer to the joy we saw when we first showed our baby to the world. Just as importantly, this Beta plan gives us the flexibility and time we need to keep fixing bugs and making Evolve more stable.

Players who purchased Evolve before it went free-to-play will be given “Founder” status and periodically receive “gifts, rewards, and special access” from Turtle Rock. And according to another post by Turtle Rock, the free-to-play “Beta” will start on the PC, but the goal is to bring to the PS4 and Xbox One as well.

Turtle Rock will host a huge livestream detailing the changes coming to Evolve on Twitch tomorrow at noon (Eastern Time).